In a multiple-access communication system, many remote stations transmit data to a central station as a part of maintaining an overall communication link between each remote station and the central station. To avoid congestion and efficiently managing the communication resources, the central station may control the transmissions from the remote stations by either an explicit resource assignment or a command that broadcasts the congestion state of the communication resources. In a wireless communication system, a base station may be the central station and the mobile stations may be the remote stations. However, managing allocation of resources in terms of communications data rate from the mobile stations to the base station, is often difficult and less than optimum due to many factors. Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus to use an optimum data rate for a mobile station under most channel conditions permitted by transmissions from other mobile stations.